Nice piece. Those fucking wood borers. There's a specific type here in MI called the emerald ash borer that, as the name suggests, eats ash trees. Ash trees used to be one of the major varieties here, and now they're quite scarce. Another invasive agent, Dutch elm disease has virtually extincted elm trees in MI, which used to be ubiquitous, in the half century since its introduction. Hopefully nothing will come along to kill Oak and Maple, or else the great Northern deciduous forests will be a thing for the history books. And, let's wait until an Asian carp is found in the Great Lakes. Kiss the fucking ecosystem goodbye. The worst part about that is that we know its a threat, and Obama could have the EPA shut off the canal from the Mississippi river system to the Chicago river system with the stroke of a pen, but his Chicago cronies don't want to be inconvenienced by the longer shipping routs. If the fishing industry collapses here, it's (literally) 100% on his shoulders. Shame on him.
All roads lead to kudzu. That's the thing: from an evolutionary perspective, monoculture is pretty much the goal. Our bizarre insistence on biodiversity is outside of evolution. I'm a big fan, but I also recognize that it isn't rational behavior when viewed from a purely evolutionary standpoint.
First -I really enjoyed this, thanks for posting. Secondly, have you ever used Kudzu in cooking? It actually works really well as a thickening agent.FYI.
Indeed. The curious thing is that monoculture is the ostensible "goal" (to use a somewhat misleading analogy) of individuals in the short term, but it can only lead to ecosystem collapse in the long term, as there aren't any stable states that exist in such condition. There's a bio-mathematician, Josh Mittledorf, who has done some interesting work in this field, and he has hypothesized that aging itself is actually a target of selection that serves to control populations. Its hard to do his hypothesis justice in a paragraph, but the gist is that stability criteria says that the most efficient way to prevent ecosystem collapse is to have a somewhat defined lifespan for each creature, that the ecosystem itself is selected on, not just individuals. What is good for one species in the short run may be terrible for it in the long run, like a bacteria that kills its host. Kudzu is a sickness on the South.